Temporary Pynchon Thread

Time to log off and do some real reading, I guess!

anyway, really enjoying it so far, especially for the relative accessibility, which is allowing me to enjoy the details without worrying about getting totally lost.

I don't understand the initial criticisms of the novel at all - if anything it feels more generous and 'human' than any of his other books (disclaimer, not read Vineland). Anyone who can read the Merle and Dally section and still feel Pynchon can't do 'proper characterisation' is mad.

Still - army of Arctic subterranean gnomes with laser crossbows = r0x0r.

i read up some on the maths and quaternions in particular to help me thru those sections, tho strictly speaking they're not necessary plotwise or even themewise but more for the sake of gags. there's some pretty absurd multilingual puns around too.

just finished the book -- the european politics/balkans section around p. 800 with british spies etc felt like it really dragged -- really the roughest spot in the book. but there's a great momentum towards the end following it, particularly when it hits california and all of a sudden there's a whole new pynchon register for his writing that just rushes out of nowhere and you've felt the whole world shift beneath yr. feet and the strange curls of postwar progress.

it seems to me at this point that the underlying theme is really arrivals and departures and a growing sort of mood more than anything else that's hard to capture in simple language, but just of coming to find one's place in a world that as one ages becomes increasingly both scary and sprawling but also with mercy and deliverance in the oddest moments. a secular wakeful dream of a life in grace.

Picked up the new one but am saving it for Christmastime.

Gotta disagree on both counts. Easiest to finish, yes, but deceptive. Like Lake Inverarity, there's a lot hidden underneath the surface.

V is in many ways the most straightforward, and offers a good primer in How To Read Pynchon. In addition to being great fun in its own right.

A friend of mine is using ATD as a 'way into' the bigger Pynchon novels. He read Lot 49 recently and is finding this easier going - I'm find it very accessible.

That said the last 800 or so pages could be complete crap for all I know ;)

You just blew my mind.

I've kind of lost momentum on this due to a few other things going on so I'm only maybe 300 pages into it. Still nothing has outweirded the undergound gnomes with laser crossbows/fastforwarded Odyssey bit yet.

LOL

also the way that the captive tail in M&D parallels the CoC stuff in ATD started me thinking about the delicate and generous way p uses metafictional devices as compared to most. Also struck by how ATD *didn't* have the accel. of episodic movement and flights of fancy that most P novels have in their rush to the end (granted, M&D had a denouement following, but still...)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/b/a/bbaa9197e741970193c784b29d00c890.png

Pynchon Wiki is sort of helpful, but is there anybody wanting to offer spoiler-free chat about any of these confusions?

quaternions are easy tho -- wikipedia's section on them is pretty good. they're just a now superceded form of multidimensional vector calculation.

"Kit was put to work sorting the catch....soon developing a sense of nuance among turbot and brill, cod and hake sole, plaice, and bream."

xpost

I'm liking the way it oscilates between the relatively naturalistic bits, mostly but not entirely set in Colorado, and sheer lunacy mostly (entirely?) set outside the USA.

It's clear to me that Pynchon is consciously doing pastiches of different kinds of modern fantastic writing. I haven't tried to match everything up, but the ill-fated Arctic expedition is clearly H.P. Lovecraft, the sand fleas in the Go Desert is pure William Burroughs, the living Tarot is G.K.Chesterton/Charles Williams-style metaphysical fantasy, the peyote trip is Carlos Castoneda (presumably: I've never read him), there's all the Tom Sawyer/Boys Own Adventure stuff with the Chums of Chance of course, not to mention the explicit riffs on The Time Machine and Lost Horizon.

(I've been doing my best to avoid reading the reviews until after I finish, but I get the impression that the conventional wisdom is that the book is wildly inconsistent. I suspect that most reviewers are wishing he'd written a nice straightforward conventionally liberal historical narrative about the mine-workers unions in the early 1900's. To which I say, phooey! If that is in fact the case...)

And he'll be hard-pressed ever to top Joaquin Stick or Geli Tripping.

-- PFS (s_f_peterse...), December 21st, 2006.

I so debated posting this, but I thought I'd look like I was too easily amused. I agree, tho.

(And it hardly seems like any kind of flaw when talking about a Pynchon novel. Ficht nicht mit der Rockettenmensch and all that...)

Also, somebody wanna speculate about the weird cryptography talk directed Cyprian's way (IIRC) somewhere between 700 - 850, the discussion of errata and texts overlaid with texts? I had a Neal Stephenson moment, almost, and then I got suspicious that Tommy-P was screwin' around with me, trying to imply a secret novel of some sort. Plz to discuss!

What, the car or the novel? Anyway, sticker oughtta read: MY OTHER CAR IS THOMAS PYNCHON

...but then Pynchon is typically only interested in politics as an epiphenomenon of elite cruelty, cynicism, greed, lust, and self-preservation. It's the wake left behind the good ship Anubis.

In this, his worldview doesn't actually stray too far from Homer, only the gods ein sich aren't there to command, provoke, or, ultimately provide rationale. But he certainly wouldn't blink at the Greek/Ilian casus belli. He'd just make it less noble and more sad, and avoid anything more than a rueful sentence or two suggesting the elevation of tragedy.

So since he's generally more concerned with the consequences of world-historical events for the schlemiels stuck inside them without hope of escape (hope of escape serving as one of the key axes separating preterite from elite) than he is with The March Of History, the only way he'd draw that kind of analogy would be to make it SO OBVIOUS EVEN THE CHARACTERS COULD SEE IT. And thus cartoon it away.

But of course, the US isn't even in the casino of the Great Game yet, let alone at the table. It's the Vibe robber baron capital formation that will end up serving as the ante. And the diminished fortunes of a shell-shocked Continent.

hehe

Uhgh, I got more to type, but I've got to go to the bank.

http://www.edrants.com/?p=5231